I hate it when something sneaks up on me and makes me cry at work. It never has anything to do with work itself, but it’s still kind of embarrassing and awkward. Something like that happened today, so just a warning - this post might end up making you cry.
Anyone who knows me very well knows about my daughter The Bean, and how she has a rare congenital heart condition called Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome. We are so fortunate that it’s been under control for over a year now, without any medication. But when The Bean was born, we didn’t know she had WPW. When she was all of about three weeks old, she suddenly stopped eating. I consulted with our wonderful Kaiser nurse on the phone and we decided to wait a day and see if she was maybe just a little under the weather. A day went by, and then another, and she still only consumed tiny amounts of formula (she had previously been a very enthusiastic nurser). She grew pale and slept even more than usual. On the third day I took her to the pediatrician’s office.
Bean was in SVT (a type of tachycardia, or fast heartbeat). She was very, very ill. We were immediately transferred to the emergency room where I watched a team of at least eight people stand around my tiny little daughter, in the middle of a gigantic ER bed, and fight to save her life. First they struggled to get a line into her tiny veins to administer medication, then the meds they gave her to slow her heart worked too well and her heart stopped. They brought in the crash cart and then my husband and I watched every parent’s worst nightmare unfold before our eyes, just a few feet in front of us. I’ll never forget the sight of someone doing compressions on her tiny little chest, just to keep her heart beating. In those moments I thought it was all over, and we were going to lose her. I felt most sorry for her father - I’d carried her for nine months and felt like I knew her so well after being kicked in the ribs so many times by her. But he’d only known her a few weeks.
We were very, very lucky that day, and for many days after. Bean recovered. She was in the PICU for two weeks but with medication her WPW was controlled. Complications like a large blood clot, for which we had to inject her with blood thinner twice a day, eventually cleared up. After a year, she went off the heart medicine and has been fine since then, though she’ll probably need to have surgery the summer before she starts kindergarten. Every parent feels grateful for a healthy child, but I think I feel easily twice as grateful. Especially when I read something like the post that made me cry at work this morning.
Through Kristin at Better Now, I learned that Jen, another blogger, has lost her daughter, at just six weeks old. I can’t imagine anything more heartbreaking. It makes me realize just how lucky we are, but that somehow makes me feel even worse right now. I will certainly hug The Bean a little harder tonight.
